Mandriva's CEO got interviewed for the Mandriva club. "Right now, the new 'in thing' is Ubuntu. Of course, the situation is a bit different in this case: one person, with a quasi infinite check book is behind the operation. So they can give the system away and spend whatever is needed. Is this the right way for the open source eco-system? I find it hard to believe. One possible worse case scenario is that Ubuntu's plan is to use money to put all other community-based distros out of business and then start monetizing the installed base. If this were the case, they are doing the easy part: increasing their market share by giving away the product. We have found that the second part is a tad more difficult."

> He is criticizing the Ubuntu project because nowadays Ubuntu is by far the most popular linux distribution and getting more and more attention by linux users, including Mandriva users.

Will this myth ever die?! Ubuntu gets the most hits on distrowatch.org. Why people put such credence in that useless statistic, I have never understood. In all fairness, when Mandriva was at the top of that useless metric, it was called the most popular distro, too.

Netcraft is also flawed as a measure of OS popularity. But I'd put more faith in it than I would in distrowatch hits for heaven's sake.